1. It shows more results then any other link checking tool (not including Google webmaster tools, but you can’t check competitors with that) – You can see a maximum of 1,000 separate domains linking to a URL or domain.

2. It only ever shows 2 results from one domain so the results you get don’t get swamped with a couple of site wide links.

3. If your IP address is based in the UK the results show the links with the most juice on Yahoo UK at the top so you can find out which links are helping you most on Yahoo. From the testing that I have done I have seen that generally Yahoo rates the same UK sites Google does – the links that rank high on Altavista’s link command will be from sites with good PageRank.

So there you have it, if you like checking on who’s linking to your site or blog go to Altavista.com and give it a shot.

You can check how many links a page has by searching for link: and then the page URL and you can check how many links a domain has by typing in linkdomain: and then the domain you want to check without the www. Just like on Yahoo site explorer but better.

Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The allinanchor command basically shows you the search results according to links only, so content is not a factor. 3 years ago you could do a regular search and then do an allinanchor and work out things like this website isn’t ranking as high as it should do because it hasn’t got enough anchor text links or it hasn’t got the right keywords in the content.

Unfortunately at sometime around February 2006 the command seemed to stop working. Now I don’t believe Google actually disabled the tool, because if they did I think it just wouldn’t do anything. Allinanchor searches on Google will still bring up results, it is just the vast majority of the time they are no different to the regular results.

I believe the command stopped working because the algorithm changed, on page factors are no where near as important as they used to be and lets face it most of the time when people get a lot of links on something they are optimised on page for it.

So what can you use the allinanchor search command for?

OK so here it is, the allinanchor command is a Google Sandbox detection tool. If you want to get a rough estimate of where a sandboxed site should be ranking according to the links it has then use the allinanchor command.

Here is an example, one of the brand new sites that I am working on KoshCreative.co.uk is currently ranking nowhere in the 1st few hundred results for its main phrase design agency even though it has lots of links with that anchor text. If I do a allinanchor search on Google UK for design agency, I can see the site coming up on page 6 – Link

I believe that the position result is roughly where the site would be ranking according to the links it has if it were not in the sandbox.

With a little testing I think you could make a pretty good Google sandbox detection tool by using this command. If any of you know anyone who could make something like this up for me I might be willing to pay to try it out.

Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

I ran a report using my premium MyBlogLog account to see how many readers clicked onto the Google.com domain from this blog in the last week and then I ran one to see how many readers came from the Google.com and Google.co.uk domains, here are the results:

• This blog sent Google – 2097 visitors
• Google sent this blog – 1794 visitors

So in a bizarre case of role reversal this week I have sent Google about 15% more traffic then it sent me.

The vast majority of the Google traffic came from Google reader not from search, I wish this blog got that much search traffic.

Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

As an example, here are some intriguingly shaped communities which take on a new appearance when viewed from the air, along with those same areas pinpointed in embedded maps. Take a look around.

Trails West, Arizona

(Above) To begin, here’s a small mobile home community called Trails West just outside Tuscon, Arizona. The interesting thing about it is the shape as there aren’t many towns or communities with such a distinctly triangular boundary.

Sun City, Arizona

(Above) Sun City is a planned retirement community in Arizona which, due to its design and hundreds of identical houses, offers an incredible view on Google Maps. Dozens of tightly knit roads snake around the area and a even form a couple of huge circular neighbourhoods.

Ixtapaluca, Mexico

(Above) The town of Ixtapaluca in Mexico is full of low-income housing identical to the examples you see in the photo above, resulting in rows and rows of cookie-cutter homes which resemble a cartoon-based community. From above, the area is just as uniform and equally as fascinating. 

Bourtange, Netherlands

(Above) The beautiful star-shaped village of Bourtange was originally built as a fort in the 1500s, the shape chosen due to its highly effective defensive qualities. Today it houses a village and museum and looks incredibly unique, especially when viewed from the air. There are a few other similarly shaped villages around the world but none as defined as this one. 

Harborwalk, Texas

(Above) Developers in Galveston decided to build a planned community on the wetlands in Galveston and came up with a strange design where houses sit on rings of land which, from above, resemble concentric ripples on the water. At the moment the town is still under development, hence the numerous gaps where homes should stand.

Palm Islands, Dubai

(Above) The award for Most Eccentrically Shaped Community has to go to Palm Islands in Dubai, an incredibly ambitious project which will, if ever completed following the financial crisis, consist of 3 separate palm tree shaped islands off the coast. Work on the first island began in 2001 and can be seen on Google Maps. The size and scale of the project is astounding.

This post was put together by our writer/blogger Shaun Usher AKA deputy dog. Sorry it’s a little bit off topic but IMO what it lacks in relevance it makes up for in awesomeness.

He found the story on a website called KRGV.com, you can read it here. It’s about some women in Texas who found an image that she believes is the Virgin Mary on her air conditioner.

There weren’t very many details really so I just re-worded it pretty much, blew up the tiny photo to a decent size and published it, you can see my post here.

I really didn’t expect it to go anywhere, I mean look at the image, it does in fact look more like death then the Virgin Mary, but to my amazement it did. The bait was just about crap enough to actually work. I got people talking about this image all over the web. Check out the discussions at Reddit, Propeller, Mixx and Plime.

I went to bed last night thinking oh well it’s not going to get any good links but at least it sparked a bit of discussion and sent Airconco a bit of traffic. When I woke up this morning and checked the stats, everything looked pretty normal, 1,500 from Reddit, 90 from Mixx etc. but then I saw Twitter.com 500 clicks. Now I don’t know a lot about Twitter, but that looked like a lot of traffic, my previous actual decent baits had gotten 50-100 clicks from Twitter at the most.

About an hour later I refreshed the stats. again and now Twitter had sent over 1,000 clicks. I decided to do a bit of investigating and found the URL that was sending the Twitter traffic: http://bit.ly/NVE6h, I searched Google for the URL and found Ashton Kutcher’s twitter profile aplusk.

Ashton Kutcher is a big time movie star, he was in that movie Dude, Where’s My Car and he is married to Demi Moore. He is one of the most popular Twitter users with over 2 million followers. Getting some of my work linked to by him is awesome.

The Airconco website has had 5,172 visits from Twitter.com so far and he only linked to the story about 9 hours ago – Link

Update: The traffic has started to calm down now and the post has had just under 10,000 unique visitors from Twitter.com, about 4,5000 uniques that are unaccounted for and a couple more thousand uniques from other social networks. Altogether the story has had over 16,500 visitors and there are 60 comments on the post.

Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

I’ve been doing the usual link building stuff, getting it listed in directories, giving it a bookmark here and there and because it is a nice looking site getting it featured in CSS galleries.

When I was searching for CSS galleries to submit to I came accross this site called The CSS Gallery List offering me a deal where for $20 they will submit you to 87 CSS directories. Now I never buy directory submission services from anywhere, I always do them myself by hand, mainly because they always submit you to crappy linkfarms, but this site was offering me submissions to quality well designed sites with good PageRank and unique features so I gave it a shot.

I have got to say that I am absolutely amazed at the results, less then 24 hours after I purchased the service CSS gallery listings were showing up on Google, many of them with labelled dofollow image links going directly to the Kosh Creative website. Plus because I submitted the website title as as Kosh Creative Design Agency instead of Kosh Creative many of the links had good anchor text.

The best part about this though is the traffic, before I bought the pack the Kosh site was only getting a few visitors, about 10-25 a day. I bought the package on Tuesday the 26th of May and immediately it started getting more visits, here are the site’s visitor traffic levels for the last 7 days according to Google analytics:

25/05 – 22
26/05 – 53
27/05 – 59
28/05 – 58
29/05 – 597
30/05 – 401
31/05 – 292

As you can see on Friday the traffic just exploded, this is because it got featured on CSS Mania and a couple of other biggish ones. Here are the 10 CSS galleries that have sent the most traffic to Kosh so far:

• CSS Mania – 846
• CSS Based – 31
• CSS Leak – 28
• CSS Motion – 18
• QNT – 15
• Best CSS Gallery – 11
• CSS Cookie – 10
• CSS Websites – 9
• Best CSS Vault – 8
• CSS Fury – 8

So let me break this down for you for $20 I got the Kosh Creative website about 30-40 links on separate high PageRank sites, most of the links pass juice, many of them even have good anchor text and to top it off the links have sent a shit load of targeted traffic (because the site is in the design industry), the traffic has already gained the site about 6-7 delicious bookmarks over the weekend and I am sure it will lead to Ben getting work.

I know some of you might say well linkbaiting can be even cheaper and it can, but most of the time it is hard god dam work, this isn’t, it took me like 30 seconds to fill in that form and look what I got out of it.

It probably won’t be anywhere near as successful if you have a plain looking site like this one because it won’t get accepted in most of them, but if you have a good looking site that you are trying to promote it is a great way to spend $20 on link building.

Get yourself over to The CSS Gallery List and give it a whirl, you will not be sorry.

Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

“Dear Webmaster,

First of all let me introduce myself – I am Suny, Link Manager

handle online marketing for my client http://www.sunyseocompany.com

To increase the link popularity of my client’s site , we are now looking for triangular Link swapping with some good quality sites. You are already aware that Triangular Link swapping is much more popular and beneficial than Reciprocal Link exchange . This way both the sites gets the benefited . I would request you to place my client’s link at your site. ( please add my site at least page rank(1) page.)

Here are details of my site :

Url : http://www.sunyseocompany.com

Title : Professional SEO Company

Des: SEO Company ‘SEO Visions’ is home to suny and eajaz, experts in Search Engine Optimization, Traffic Building and Internet Marketing. Increase your return on investment online with us today.Email:-suny@sunyseocompany.com

Or you can simply use the following Linking code:

a href = http://www.sunyseocompany.com > Professional SEO Company SEO Company ‘SEO Visions’ is home to suny and eajaz, experts in Search Engine Optimization, Traffic Building and Internet Marketing. Increase your return on investment online with us today.Email:-suny@sunyseocompany.com

I will add your link at my site on Page Rank. choose any one site ;-

http://submitexpress.we.bs :- page rank -4

Please forward me your linking details along with confirmation where my link have been added by you.

Hoping an early and positive response from your side.

Have a nice day ahead

Best Regards”

All sounds pretty good right? Wrong, the site Suny is offering me a link on is an exact rip off the Submit Express UK website and he had used the old blackhat PageRank 10 trick to fake the PageRank, when he 1st sent me the email his website http://submitexpress.we.bs was showing a PageRank 4/10.

I knew he had faked it because at the time if I looked at the Google cache of http://submitexpress.we.bs it went straight to the cache of http://www.submitexpress.co.uk.

If I had of gone for his deal I would have got no real link as the site he was offering me a link on was not even included in the Google index.

What this guy was doing was wrong on so many different levels so I emailed Submit Express and told them what he had done.

Today I got I new email from Sunny that was pretty much the same as the last one only this time he was offering me a link on a new URL:

“I will add your link at my site on Page Rank.

http://www.seocompanys.we.bs/ page rank -5″

If you check right now that site that he is offering me a link from: http://www.seocompanys.we.bs is an exact clone of SEOCompany.ca and if you click on the link below:

Google cache of: http://www.seocompanys.we.bs

You will see that the cache of seocompanys.we.bs just goes straight to the cache of seocompany.ca. This is because Suny has used the old redirect trick.

This guy has really gone the extra mile with the link exchange scam, I bet a few people have been taken in by the prospect of a nice link from a PR4 or PR5 site.

I feel sorry for the people who are getting ripped off by this guy so I have outed him. I am surprised that the fake PageRank trick still works.

Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

However some new evidence has just come to the surface which further proves that linking to DigitalPoint.com could indeed be harmful. Now this evidence is not damming and it could easily be a coincidence, but it definitely made me wonder.

Here are the new PR scores for each of the SEO tool reviews on this site:

• Marketleap Link Popularity Checker – PR4
• SEOmoz Page Strength Tool – PR4
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – PR4
• XML Sitemaps Sitemap Generator – PR4
• Joost De Valk Nofollow Display – PR4
• Digital Point Geotargeting Tool – PR0
• Dead Links Broken Link Checker – PR4
• WebConfs HTTP Header Checker – PR4

Can you spot the odd one out? What do you think? Is this just a coincidence? Or has Google well and truly deemed DigitalPoint.com a bad neighborhood that should not be linked to?

Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

I typed in linkdomain:seoco.co.uk and up came this URL: http://www.w3.org/Mobile/planet. I got really excited and actually did a little jig thinking that I had been linked to by the W3. But I had not been linked to by them, this guy called Andrew Grill had linked and his feed is displayed on that page. The link from W3 was temporary and pretty worthless.

Today again I was teased whilst checking the links to this site. The URL I saw come up was from Harvard no less: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/planet/idtechtools/, the stuff link building dreams are made of. I really got my hopes up only to once again find that it was a temporary link. This time it was because a guy called Ethan Zuckerman had linked to me.

So there you have it, don’t get excited about the links you see in site explorer until you are sure that they are permanent. The links from Andrew and Ethan are also amazing of course.

On a much happier link building note: a mainstream media site did link to the article on the mainstream media linking out.

Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

Advertising

I am now running adsense on the site. Sorry about that. I just like the idea of getting free money, even if it is not a lot. I think if you want your ads to show up on this site you can select it with Google adwords or something, but I am not 100% sure. Other then that I am open to offers, I will sell a banner on the frontpage of this site if the money is right. No text links or anything though – I know it sucks.

According to Google Analytics this site has had 20,833 mainly very highly targeted visitors in the last 30 days. Although admittedly this Watch-Movies.net SEO review has accounted for about 5,000 of those.

Please drop me a mail, if you are interested in advertising on this site.

The Times Got Their PageRank Back

I 1st noticed this yesterday, it is nice to see some good has come out of the authority sites with a PageRank penalty post.

Directory Listings

I have started to make a UK SEO directory and a web designers directory.

The SEO one is already quite comprehensive – I have listed most of the better whitehat-ish UK companies that I know about in there. Please feel free to drop me a mail if you would like a listing, but I am very strict. You wont here back from me either way, if I think your site is the real deal it will be listed.

The web design one I just need listings for – I know different people like different things. I do however have some standards, if your own website has 120+ coding errors on the homepage it does not look good. People like me have to clean up these messes and it is not my idea of a cool Friday night. An error or two here and there I don’t mind and I would probably not reject you purely on bad code, especially if you have good graphic design skills or something. But take note, it is part of the quality score – a bit like Google’s algo. Just send me a mail if you want me to check out your UK web design site.

Buy Linkbait Online

Visit our linkbait services page to buy a piece of linkbait online for £999 through Google Checkout. It says we will take a week to make it, but the truth is we have quality writers just waiting to write some linkbait for your site right now – we will probably have it done in 3 days. We have dropped the price to £999 to try and bring in some sales. Visit the page for details of what you get with the service. We have been consistently getting good results for some time now. For most medium to large sized sites it is well worth it, I had my doubts, but I have seen the benefit now. It takes time, but when well optimised sites start to build authority they can fly.

Awesome Links

I never end up linking to any of the stuff I want to link to, so here are 10 really cool blog posts from this last week – not just SEO.

• 10 Dead People Who Weren’t Really Dead – Neatorama.com
• Google In Final Negotiations To Acquire Digg For “Around $200 Million” – Techcrunch.com
• 6 Sure-Fire Tactics to Re-Ignite your Linkbait – ViperChill.com
• Sadness In The Search Industry : Respect Each Other – SERoundTable.com
• Google’s Knol Launches: Like Wikipedia, With Moderation – SearchEngineLand.com
• 10 Amazing Sand Artists and Their Artwork: From Humongous Sand Castles to Wrathful Sea Gods – WebUrbanist.com
• Shocking & Creative Ads from the Urban Jungle – DarkRoastedBlend.com
• Will It Float? A guide to getting Google to love you – SEOpscentre.com
• Create an Effective Strategy for Managing Your Online Profiles – SearchEnginePeople.com
• FireFox for SEOs: Working with Several FireFox Profiles – SearchEngineJournal.com

I will try to get a couple of more substantial posts out next week.

Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

Some websites have adopted a half hearted approach of linking to lots of websites, but only from blog posts – the main articles in the site only contain internal links.

We believe that linking to useful websites doesn’t “leak” traffic – quite the opposite in fact. Offering useful links actually makes visitors more likely to return to see what other interesting websites they might find in the future, a model that sites such as Digg and Fark are built around.

Of course as a blogger it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the fact that mainstream media websites are, with the exception of the BBC, business entities with shareholders and an obligation to maximise profits. It’s understandable that they are reluctant to send valuable page views elsewhere. We spent some time researching the issue to see if there was a correlation between the frequency a site links out and the number of links it gets in return.

The results below might just surprise you.

	Links out			Links
Newspaper	Main stories	Blog posts	Domain Strength	Incoming	Outgoing
			99%	29,629,082	1,730,000
			99%	18,415,777	970,000
			88%	25,667,372	1,940,000
			97%	15,114,877	1,600,000
			87%	14,421,388	722,000
			98%	11,986,781	729,000
			99%	11,867,676	1,080,000
			97%	9,968,336	1,360,000
			92%	7,862,887	254,000
			97%	7,038,634	474,000
			92%	5,980,262	275,000
			83%	5,434,310	357,000
			88%	4,121,583	144,000
			93%	3,995,969	330,000
			97%	3,709,030	1,460,000
			96%	3,667,889	169,000
			83%	3,233,951	12,600
			92%	3,087,518	226,000
			90%	2,452,153	211,000
			88%	1,001,791	16,800
			78%	552,930	196,000
			74%	408,462	60,700
			60%	183,570	14,500
			60%	164,586	3,960
			58%	94,804	878
			48%	31,356	337

By entering all the incoming and outgoing link values from the table above into an Excel spreadsheet we used the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient to determine whether there was in fact a correlation between the number of times a website links out and the number of links it gets back in return.

The resulting figure of 0.842733801 shows that in general there is a strong relationship between news websites linking out and getting links in return.

Comments from the media

In order to make sure this article was as balanced as possible we contacted a number of mainstream newspapers to ask what their linking policy was. The responses are below.

It appears that a number of newspapers have a policy of linking out, but in practice this doesn’t always happen for many reasons.

Tom Happold, Network editor Guardian Unlimited

“It has always been our policy to point our readers to whatever we think is of interest on the web.”

James Montgomery – Editor, FT.com

“What I can say, regarding attribution by the FT to non-FT sources, is that one needs a clear distinction between “attribution” and “sourcing”, journalistically speaking. Citing a non-FT source would not, generally speaking, meet the FT’s required standards of verification. (Just because something is reported by the New York Times, say, doesn’t make it true, however much we implicitly believe what we read in that newspaper – we have to check for ourselves.)

Obviously, we are more inclined to believe some sources (Reuters) than others (chat rooms). Many blogs might be regarded as inherently unreliable because they don’t reveal their sources or uphold traditional journalistic/MSM standards of reporting (eg, double sourcing, on the record or whatever). But there is nothing intrinsically untrustworthy about blogs as a genre.

So when it comes to linking out on FT.com, a link does not constitute sourcing for us. But as a general rule, if we do acknowledge some third party content, then best practice would be to carry a link to it.

For example, if we write: “Yesterday’s statement by the prime minister appeared to represent a climbdown from an interview to the BBC last week in which he pledged….”, then we would link “interview” to the BBC article. That’s a service to the reader, who may want to follow the link to learn more; and a confirmation that we have accurately reported the earlier quote.

Do we also live up to this best practice? No, because of some technology issues to do with persistent hyperlinks in text in our CMS, and newsroom training. But we are improving.

Last, and this is probably what you really want to know, when do we acknowledge third-party content? This is tricky – lots of facts/information/articles written in the FT, or any other publication for that matter, existed earlier somewhere else. But so what? That doesn’t mean we have to credit every snippet of information to another publisher. We do “hat tip” our competition, in print or online, for a genuine clean scoop; and best practice would therefore require a link.”

Drew Broomhall – Search Editor, Times Online

“Times Online has a policy of linking out to third party sites where editorially appropriate, such as products, organisations, reports etc mentioned in articles. Some sections do more than others, it depends on the section’s editor. Our outbound link count might even have been higher before the relaunch, a lot of links were lost due to html being stripped out of inline links when they migrated to a new CMS.”

Credits: Mark Woodbury, Trifecta Tool Set, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live Search.

Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

Image credit: too much stumbleupon

Around about a week ago I was happily stumbling away when all of a sudden this warning page came up, telling me that my account had been disabled:

Stumbleupon warning

Stumbleupon has been temporarily disabled, because you have used it too much.

• Stop stumbling and disable stumbleupon toolbar
• Do your work
• Don’t think about stumbling

I feel really stupid now, but I fell for this thing hook, line and sinker. I thought that I had been caught stumbling my own blog too much and that someone at stumbleupon was messing with me.

The page is possibly one of the most popular stumbles ever, it was discovered about 8 days ago and already it has received 351 reviews.

I wanted to find out more about the page and who created it, so I used the form on the website to contact the creator. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions for me, but wishes to remain anonymous:

Question 1: How long have you been a member of StumbleUpon?

Answer: I have used stumbleupon since April 2007, So it is about 1,5 years ago.

Question 2: Did you create the page for fun? profit? Or both?

Answer: It was just for fun, I was bored and playing with new firefox 3 and surfing on the “about:robots” page. I noticed how easily the source of the about:robots page could be copied, I remembered those funny “stop stumbling” images and got the idea. I created the page, uploaded it to my site, added it to stumble and forgot it.

Question 3: How many unique visitors has the page had so far?

Answer: Here are my traffic statistics according to AWStats and Google Analytics:

• AWStats – 101,789
• Google – 89,901

Question 4: Has the amount of traffic you have received surprised you?

Answer: It was a big surprise to me, because I almost forgot the whole page… The last popular page I had: a joke about vista’s source code, only received 9,240 visitors.

Question 5: Have you ever thought about a career in viral marketing?

Answer: Nope.

Going off this page’s performance, I would definitely be interested in taking this guy on for his social media skills. He is not a professional and as far as I am concerned he hasn’t even marketed the page – One hundred thousand unique visitors and going strong.

Here is a link to the warning page and the 350+ comments at SU.

Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

Image credit: google pagerank

Google really got serious about giving out PageRank penalties in October last year. Andy Beard was at the centre of attention and the following post, a long with a couple of others that he did got a lot of traction:

Google PageRank Update October 2007

The 7 in the title of this post is not a fixed number. I want to put together a big list of all of the most important sites/pages on the net that appear to have PageRank penalties.

Normally PR penalties are applied to sites selling text links outside of the Google guidelines, but in some of these cases I couldn’t find any paid links. The sites may have internal linking issues or there might be other reasons. I just have a feeling that all of the following sites should have a higher PageRank score:

Enn.com

Environmental News Network is and environment news site and hub that has been around since before 1997. The website currently has a Google PR of 4/10, I am guessing it should be 8/10.

Possible reason for penalty: Up until very recently this site had spammy text links in its footer. These are gone now so maybe the site is due for an update. Or maybe there is another reason.

Update: I am pleased to report that Enn.com appears to be no longer penalised. The website’ homepage now has a PageRank of 7/10.

Fark.com

Fark is a very popular social news site and forum, which was established in 1999. The Fark.com homepage currently has a Google PageRank of 5/10, it should most probably be 8/10.

Possible reason for penalty: Unknown, anyone who can work out why this website is penalised will be given SEO god status – they nofollow everything. The only thing I can think of is the partner links – someone at Google may have mistaken these for payola.

Independent.ie

The Independent is a very popular Irish newspaper. The website currently has a Google PageRank of 4/10, I guess it should have a Google PageRank of at least 7 out of 10.

Possible reason for penalty: Website has dofollow text links to commercial sites in a drop down menu in the top nav. which says more services.

Update: Someone has just pointed out to me that the sites that are linked to via the drop down menu are owned by the Independent, so it is possibly a mistake on Google’s part if those are indeed the cause. Even if they explain on a reinstatement that they own those sites, Google may still keep them penalised – purely because of their anchor text choices and the fact that they are linking from a trusted news source to highly commercial properties.

Online.WSJ.com

The Wall Street Journal is beyond important. The homepage of this site currently has a Google PageRank of 5/10. I am guessing that the site should have a PR of 8/10.

Possible reason for penalty: Unknown

STPT.com

According to Wikipedia in 1997 Starting Point was the 7th most trafficked site on the net. Sometime during the 1st few months of 2008 the sites PageRank dropped from 7 or 8 out of 10 to 5/10. At the April 2008 PageRank update the sites PageRank again fell, this time to 4/10.

Possible reason for penalty: It looks like the website may have been penalised because of the directory of websites it has. Website owners can pay $99 per anum to have their website reviewed for a listing. IMO the directory is well maintained, but they need to make an effort to add more BOTW sites themselves.

TimesOnline.co.uk

The Times of London is one of the oldest and most well read and respected newspapers in the world. Website currently has a Google PageRank of 5/10 on its homepage, I am guessing it should be an 8/10.

Possible reason for penalty: Unknown, but there maybe some text links on the site somewhere that are leaking PageRank. I would say that if there is that it is probably just a mistake and not intentional.

Update: I am pleased to report that The Times is no longer penalised and back to a PageRank of 8/10.

W3Schools.com

Far more geeky then the rest of the sites, but equally important. The internet has been built on information provided by websites like this. Website homepage has a PR 5/10, I am guessing it should be an 8 or a 9/10.

Possible reason for penalty: It looks like the website may be selling text links..

If you know a really important site that has had its PageRank reduced just leave the URL, why you think it is important, your name and your website. If it is a good one it will be added to the list.

Update: Drew Broomhall from The Times has been in touch with me. Some unintended paid text links were the cause of the penalty. These links were nofollowed a long time a go, but the penalty remains.

I told Drew what he needed to do to get it back, but he did not seem overly concerned. He knows that PageRank penalties do not effect rankings or traffic. I have a feeling that now it has been talked about, it will get fixed.

Random thought: I have been trying to think of some reasons why a PageRank penalty could be bad for a website. Obviously for people in the SEM industry it is quite important. If you have a poor PageRank score, people might think that you are not very good at what you do. But what about other industries?

I have studied the effect of links from PageRank and -40 hit penalised sites and one thing that I am sure about is this: if the visible PageRank is not there then it cannot be passed. I am not suggesting that links from penalised sites do not work, because in some instances they definitely do. I believe that links from PageRank penalised sites do not pass as much trust and authority to the sites they link to.

So here is the only potential drawback for the publisher that I can think of: If you own other websites that you link to, then those sites will not be getting the credit they deserve in the search engines.

Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

Image above: search result on google for searchengineland.com

Have any of you started to notice the new Google trend URL page results showing up in the SERPs? Here are a few examples:

• Blogstorm.co.uk
• DavidNaylor.co.uk
• SearchEngineJournal.com
• SearchEngineLand.com
• SERoundTable.com
• MattCutts.com

It is only a few days since Google launched the Google trends for websites and already Google is often ranking in the top 10 with the Google trend URL pages that are indexed.

IMO: this is not a bad thing: for most URLs the pages really do offer good information. The information provided on the Google trend pages is far more useful then the information provided by many of the other competing URL sites, you know aboutus.org etc.

Also IMO: I am guessing this is a mistake on Google’s part and that they will robots.txt out the Google trend pages.

Update: Kevin Gibbons from SEOptimise has noticed exactly the same thing, click on the link below to visit his post:

Google Trends indexing website URL’s & ranking for brand queries

Update:As I suspected they would do, Google have robots.txt out the pages now. I guess it is a good job I am here to keep my eye on these things for them.

Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

About 2-3 months ago I started talking to a local company about helping them with their SEO. It looked like they wanted to do something and they were just thinking things over. Next the guy called me up and said that all of his Google rankings had disappeared and that the only thing his site was coming up for was the name. The site came up no.1 for his two word company name and no.1 for the domain. However all of the other positions the site had with the homepage, albeit not good ones had disappeared. Even when I tried searching for some unique text off the homepage in quotes it did not come up. So I asked the guy a couple of questions, you know – have you made any changes recently that could have caused this to happen? etc. The guy said that the only thing he could think of was that he had placed a load of area names on the bottom of the homepage in tiny text so that no body could see. I said “bingo, that is why the site is penalised, you put hidden text on”. He got rid of the hidden text, I told him what to say to Google on the reinstatement request and his site was back to where it was previously within a week.

Again about 2-3 months ago I started to work on this new site and I came up with a temporary solution to get some link juice into the category pages. This was totally my fault and looking back it was really bad and stupid. This is the only time I have ever got a client penalised by any search engine. The site had about 130 categories and I placed an SEO friendly drop down menu on the homepage and the rest of the pages to the 130 categories. I saw some progress with the rankings initially, but around a week later the site got hit with the exact same penalty, this time it was not just the homepage that got hit, it was all of the pages where I had placed the drop down menu. It was ranking for the company name with and without Ltd, the domain and that was it. I was scared as hell, I had to tell this guy that I had got his site penalised. I spoke to the owner about it and he was so cool you have no idea, it is a good job I choose my clients carefully. Now technically I had done nothing wrong, but it looked seriously spammy – I showed it to a friend and he said “no wonder you got penalised, you’ve got hidden text, hidden links and keyword stuffing” (not technically right, but that is what it looked like). I am still waiting for the developers to finish the new site on this one. Once the site is finished I will ask the owner to send a reinstatement request, hopefully Google will forgive me for being so aggressive.

Weather this is a new penalty or not I do not know. It is different to the minus penalty because when pages are hit they do not show up anywhere, no matter what. It is different to the outright ban because affected sites stay in the index and rank for their own names. Have any of you ever seen a penalty like this? It can definitely be applied for hidden text, it could possibly be applied for hidden links or keyword stuffing.

Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.